Opinion

Last week I wrote about my day, as part of the larger #dayofhighered project of documenting what we academics do. When I left off, I still had about four hours of work to do, and I figured I’d be able to do it in the evening, after dinner.

Peter H. Diamandis, co-author of Abundance and co-founder of Singularity University, thinks that our brains are not wired to understand exponential change. We have evolved to think arithmetically rather than exponentially, and therefore have a hard time wrapping our heads around the implications of Moore's law type performance/cost improvements of digital technologies.

Twitter has been the catalyst for so many of my professional connections. The platform's simplicity belies its complexity. If you've never tried it, you won't easily get it. Having said that, a consistent occurrence takes place almost every time after I post something on this blog. A friend, colleague, or acquaintance will send me a direct message (Twitter's version of private messaging) with advice on what I should have written.

For a while now, I've been struggling with the concept of sustainability. (That's not good, since moving the campus and the institution in a sustainable direction is what Greenback U is paying me to do.) When I first got started in this job, I had a clear idea of what sustainability entailed. The problem was global warming/climate change. The solution was greenhouse gas reduction. The job was to move Greenback towards lower and lower GHG emissions, so that it (and hundreds of its closest friends) could serve as models for the rest of Western Civilization. But over the past five years or so, I've qualified and modified that understanding to the point that, at present, it seems to me that GHG emissions are but one aspect of the sustainability mess we're in, and probably not the one to emphasize.

It's time for programs to be honest about what their doctoral students need to support life's basic necessities, writes Nate Kreuter.

The much hyped device has lived up to its promise for scholars, but won't replace the laptop, writes Alex Golub.

There is strong desire for more information, transparency, and especially nuanced analysis about the emerging landscape of global higher education and research. If we just ‘do’ then we miss opportunities to learn along the way, and help educated ourselves and interested others.

Almost two hundred people watch my poetry lectures now. It's a very global group.